The Dutch Research Council (NWO, Dutch: Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) is the national research council of the Netherlands. NWO funds thousands of top researchers at universities and institutes and steers the course of Dutch science by means of subsidies and research programmes. NWO promotes quality and innovation in science. NWO is an independent administrative body under the auspices of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. NWO directs its approximate budget of 1 billion euros towards Dutch universities and institutes, often on a project basis. Also, NWO has its own research institutes and facilitates international cooperation. Current president of NWO since April 1st, 2021 is Marcel Levi. Former NWO presidents include Stan Gielen, Peter Nijkamp and Jos Engelen.NWO is also known for the annual Spinoza and Stevin Prizes.
In the classic longest common substring (LCS) problem, we are given two strings $S$ and $T$, each of length at most $n$, over an alphabet of size $\sigma$, and we are asked to find a longest string occurring as a fragment of both $S$ and $T$. Weiner, in his seminal paper that introduced the suffix tree, presented an $\mathcal{O}(n \log \sigma)$-time algorithm for this problem [SWAT 1973]. For polynomially-bounded integer alphabets, the linear-time construction of suffix trees by Farach yielded an $\mathcal{O}(n)$-time algorithm for the LCS problem [FOCS 1997]. However, for small alphabets, this is not necessarily optimal for the LCS problem in the word RAM model of computation, in which the strings can be stored in $\mathcal{O}(n \log \sigma/\log n )$ space and read in $\mathcal{O}(n \log \sigma/\log n )$ time. We show that, in this model, we can compute an LCS in time $\mathcal{O}(n \log \sigma / \sqrt{\log n})$, which is sublinear in $n$ if $\sigma=2^{o(\sqrt{\log n})}$ (in particular, if $\sigma=\mathcal{O}(1)$), using optimal space $\mathcal{O}(n \log \sigma/\log n)$. We then lift our ideas to the problem of computing a $k$-mismatch LCS, which has received considerable attention in recent years. In this problem, the aim is to compute a longest substring of $S$ that occurs in $T$ with at most $k$ mismatches. Thankachan et al.~showed how to compute a $k$-mismatch LCS in $\mathcal{O}(n \log^k n)$ time for $k=\mathcal{O}(1)$ [J. Comput. Biol. 2016]. We show an $\mathcal{O}(n \log^{k-1/2} n)$-time algorithm, for any constant $k>0$ and irrespective of the alphabet size, using $\mathcal{O}(n)$ space as the previous approaches. We thus notably break through the well-known $n \log^k n$ barrier, which stems from a recursive heavy-path decomposition technique that was first introduced in the seminal paper of Cole et al. [STOC 2004] for string indexing with $k$ errors.
A catalytic machine is a model of computation where a traditional space-bounded machine is augmented with an additional, significantly larger, “catalytic” tape, which, while being available as a work tape, has the caveat of being initialized with an arbitrary string, which must be preserved at the end of the computation. Despite this restriction, catalytic machines have been shown to have surprising additional power; a logspace machine with a polynomial length catalytic tape, known as catalytic logspace ( ), can compute problems which are believed to be impossible for . A fundamental question of the model is whether the catalytic condition, of leaving the catalytic tape in its exact original configuration, is robust to minor deviations. This study was initialized by Gupta et al. (2024), who defined lossy catalytic logspace ( [e] ) as a variant of where we allow up to e errors when resetting the catalytic tape. They showed that [e] = for any e = O(1) , which remains the frontier of our understanding. In this work we completely characterize lossy catalytic space ( [s,c,e] ) in terms of ordinary catalytic space ( [s,c] ). We show that [s,c,e] = [Θ (s + e log c), Θ (c)] In other words, allowing e errors on a catalytic tape of length c is equivalent, up to a constant stretch, to an equivalent errorless catalytic machine with an additional e log c bits of ordinary working memory. As a consequence, we show that for any e, [e] = implies [e log n] ⊆ , thus giving a barrier to any improvement beyond [O(1)] = . We also extend all our results to every variant of catalytic space.
Answering a question of Gamarnik and Smedira [15], we give a polynomial time algorithm that approximately computes the volume of a truncation of a relaxation of the independent set polytope, improving on their quasi-polynomial time algorithm. Our algorithm is obtained by viewing the volume as an evaluation of a graph polynomial and we approximate this evaluation using Barvinok’s interpolation method.
The combinatorial diameter $\operatorname{diam}(P)$ of a polytope $P$ is the maximum shortest path distance between any pair of vertices. In this paper, we provide upper and lower bounds on the combinatorial diameter of a random "spherical" polytope, which is tight to within one factor of dimension when the number of inequalities is large compared to the dimension. More precisely, for an $n$-dimensional polytope $P$ defined by the intersection of $m$ i.i.d.\ half-spaces whose normals are chosen uniformly from the sphere, we show that $\operatorname{diam}(P)$ is $\Omega(n m^{\frac{1}{n-1}})$ and $O(n^2 m^{\frac{1}{n-1}} + n^5 4^n)$ with high probability when $m \geq 2^{\Omega(n)}$. For the upper bound, we first prove that the number of vertices in any fixed two dimensional projection sharply concentrates around its expectation when $m$ is large, where we rely on the $\Theta(n^2 m^{\frac{1}{n-1}})$ bound on the expectation due to Borgwardt [Math. Oper. Res., 1999]. To obtain the diameter upper bound, we stitch these ``shadows paths'' together over a suitable net using worst-case diameter bounds to connect vertices to the nearest shadow. For the lower bound, we first reduce to lower bounding the diameter of the dual polytope $P^\circ$, corresponding to a random convex hull, by showing the relation $\operatorname{diam}(P) \geq (n-1)(\operatorname{diam}(P^\circ)-2)$. We then prove that the shortest path between any ``nearly'' antipodal pair vertices of $P^\circ$ has length $\Omega(m^{\frac{1}{n-1}})$.
Reduced-order models (ROMs) are often used to accelerate the simulation of large physical systems. However, traditional ROM techniques, such as proper orthogonal decomposition (POD)-based methods, often struggle with advection-dominated flows due to the slow decay of singular values. This results in high computational costs and potential instabilities.This paper proposes a novel approach using space-local POD to address the challenges arising from the slow singular value decay. Instead of global basis functions, our method employs local basis functions that are applied across the domain, analogous to the finite element method, but with a data-driven basis. By dividing the domain into subdomains and applying the space-local POD, we obtain a sparse representation that generalizes better outside the training regime. This allows the use of a larger number of basis functions compared to standard POD, without prohibitive computational costs. To ensure smoothness across subdomain boundaries, we introduce overlapping subdomains inspired by the partition of unity method.Our approach is validated through simulations of the 1D and 2D advection equation. We demonstrate that using our space-local approach, we obtain a ROM that generalizes better to flow conditions not included in the training data. In addition, we show that the constructed ROM inherits the energy conservation and non-linear stability properties from the full-order model. Finally, we find that using a space-local ROM allows for larger time steps.